How to hover with helicopter?

[DynV]

I'm having such a difficult time to hover with helicopter and I'm hoping I can get some assistance. When I turn it on I set the engine to maximum and when the main propeller seem to have reached its maximum speed I go up and shortly after, ie when reaching 300 altitude, I set the engine to 1/4-1/3 and try to set the climb to 0, the majority of the time by actively trying to reduce the propeller speed (pressing F2) then letting go when the climb needle is almost to 0, and eventually engine decrease catches up and I barely have to touch vertical changes. The majority of the time I'm then > 2000 altitude and horizontally a good distance from my starting point, so after lowering some distance I can start navigating by sight. Often I loose patience and get my rate of ascent < -1 and have a hard time gauging when I should get the rate to ~0 and end up crashing.

I know I would likely succeed with a rate of ascent > -0.5, but I can't wait > 5 mins to get to an appropriate altitude for hovering the city. Hmm! Maybe I should make an effort to move away horizontally from the city (as opposed to by accident in the previous paragraph) so I have the city to look at instead of just the sky?

Do you have such an issue? What do you do about it?

 

[Austin]

You don't reduce engine power or rotor speed, you reduce collective to maintain altitude.

 

[DynV]

I made a search for "Rigs of Rods helicopter collective" in vain. What does

reduce collective

mean exactly? What's the default keys I must press for that?

 

[Disloyalpick]

I made a search for "Rigs of Rods helicopter collective" in vain. What does

mean exactly? What's the default keys I must press for that?

press CTRL+T ingame and it tells you the controls

 

[Spoonie22]

Hi, the "Collective" is the word used for throttle on helicopters. If you use CTRL+T in-game, it will tell you what keybind controls the Collective. After that, mess around with it to try and get it just equal to hover. Some helicopter mods have a gauge that shows you collective.
Hope that helps

 

[Austin]

Collective is not the throttle... It's the pitch of the rotor blades.

 

[Spoonie22]

Yes sorry, I rushed my post and made a mistake. Collective does control the pitch, and I think in some helicopters it is connected to the throttle (Sorry although an aviation nerd I know nothing about helicopters, so I may be wrong). But after reading DynV's post, I think it is probably the great Hughes 500d helicopter mod, and I use that too. It is really hard to hover, and it's just really a matter of trial and error. Anyway, sorry if my post doesn't make sense, but sorry about giving the wrong definition for collective. Next time I won't be so confident about helicopters!

 

[DynV]

[...] you reduce collective to maintain altitude.

press CTRL+T ingame and it tells you the controls

[...] If you use CTRL+T in-game, it will tell you what keybind controls the Collective. [...]

I don't see it, look at

[...] after reading DynV's post, I think it is probably the great Hughes 500d helicopter mod[...]

It is. In Penguinville I managed to do the jump and couldn't find interesting to drop on so thought I might as well start flying there and it turns out there's at least 3 helipads, see: